When Peter came home from work, he stopped in the kitchen doorway and looked at her. Looking back at him with red-rimmed eyes, she told him, “I don’t want to live here,” but her voice seemed thin, whispery, and she was not sure he heard her.
“You’re a state,” he said. “Some women are like this after having a baby.” He reached down and lifted Bella out of the rocker. “Sssh…” he said to her. “Sssh…” To Ailsa, he said, “Do you think you should see a doctor?”
Ailsa was often woken at night by Peter’s snoring. When it reached a crescendo, his breathing seemed to stop altogether, before starting again. But this was different. Ailsa had woken to find Peter lying there with his hands around his own throat; she had been woken by the choking noises he was making. His eyes—she saw, as she got herself up onto her elbows to see what was going on—were very wide. As she turned on the bedside lamp, he finally managed to draw in a breath, a desperate, shallow gulp of air, and then another. When he could speak again, he whispered, “I couldn’t breathe.”
“I expect it’s this flat,” she said. “All the old dirt and dust has got into your lungs.”
“It felt like something was sitting on my chest,” he said.
In the lamplight, Ailsa looked at his chest, but the T-shirt that he wore in bed was black—there was no evidence that anything had been there; she could see no tell-tale marks.
When it happened again, she said to him, “Do you think you should see a doctor?”
The doctor found nothing wrong. “He says I’m in good shape,” said Peter.
Ailsa washed the T-shirt. She spring-cleaned the flat, with the windows wide open, even though it was winter. When she found grimy streaks low down on walls that she knew she had cleaned, she supposed that they might just be scuff marks from Peter’s polished shoes. When she found the same marks down near the bottom of the baby’s bedroom door, she began to get up in the night whether or not she could hear Bella crying; a silence was more worrying. Every few hours she was out in the hallway, going into Bella’s room, turning on the overhead light to look for grubby prints on the bedding or on the babygro or on Panda, who had been Ailsa’s own favourite cuddly toy when she was small.
“I’ve been moving the furniture,” said Ailsa.
“I can see that,” said Peter. He stood in the doorway of the baby’s room, blocking the light from the hallway, the toes of his shoes on Bella’s carpet. “But—” He looked at the thigh-high wall of furniture that Ailsa had built around the cot, inside which the baby lay prone. “But whatever for?” said Peter. “Bella can’t even sit up yet, let alone climb out of her cot.”
“It’s not to keep Bella in,” said Ailsa.
“Then what?” said Peter, but Ailsa did not reply; she was busy lashing the piano stool to the fireguard. These were both things that were not supposed to have come with them to the flat: they had no fireplace here, and no space for the piano, and even if there had been space they would not have been able to get it up all the stairs. The piano had belonged to Ailsa’s mother, whose repertoire of fey little tunes had never seemed to make use of the lower notes. For equilibrium, Ailsa had made a point of only ever playing the lower notes, until her mother complained, after which Ailsa was forbidden to touch the piano at all. Nonetheless, the piano had come to her when her father went into the home, and then Peter had got rid of it because it would not fit into the flat.
When Peter had arrived home from the bank with the news that they would have to move out of their house and into this flat, the piano had been Ailsa’s first concern. She objected to its loss. She told him that when she was a child she had loved the piano; she had longed to touch its forbidden keys. Peter agreed that it was good for a child to learn a musical instrument, but said that Bella would just have to learn something smaller, like the flute. “It doesn’t really matter,” said Peter. “It just has to be something small.”
Peter stepped into the baby’s room now, coming closer to the wall that Ailsa had built around the cot. “How are we supposed to get to Bella?” he asked.
Ailsa straightened up. “I can climb over it,” she said. “I’m tall enough.”
Peter made an appointment at the surgery for Ailsa, and dropped her off on his way to work. When the mid-afternoon bus brought her back, she saw—as she made her way from the bus stop on the corner, with the baby in a sling—the furniture out on the street, and Peter opening the boot of his car. He picked up the piano stool and put it in. As Ailsa walked past him, he picked up the fireguard.
Still in her coat, still bearing the baby, she stood looking into Bella’s room. She went back out to where Peter was busy fitting everything into the back of his car. As he slammed the boot down, Ailsa said to him, “What have you done?”
“I’ve taken all that crap out of Bella’s room,” said Peter.
“I can see that,” said Ailsa. “But whatever for?”
“I’m taking it to the tip,” said Peter. He checked that the boot was secure and moved towards the front of the car. “What did the doctor say?” he asked.
“I need more fresh air and exercise,” said Ailsa. “And a hobby.”
“A hobby?” said Peter.
“A hobby,” said Ailsa. “You know, like drawing. I might find a class to go to, pick up the still life again. Or perhaps not still life. I’m tempted to experiment, to try for that texture again. That hair was so realistic.”
“Are you still going on about that bloody sketch?” said Peter.
Sketch. She disliked the word. Sketch, like scratch, like retch, like etch. Would you like to come and see my etchings? A man—a friend of her father’s—had actually said this to her once, a long time ago, and she had gone with him, this man she had known only slightly; she had actually gone with him to see his etchings, sketchings, scratchings, retchings, and she should not have done. Her father, when she got home, shaking and tearful, and told him, had looked at her, looked her up and down. “Well, what did you expect,” he said, “going home with him, and dressed like that?” And then, within the week, this friend of her father’s was at their door, coming into the kitchen and joining them at their table as if nothing had happened, as if his being there—at their kitchen table with his fingers on their crockery—were in no way extraordinary.
“Why don’t you decorate the baby’s bedroom?” suggested Peter. “It could do with brightening up. There’s plenty for you to do here. You don’t need to go out to a class. Find a hobby you can do at home.”
She had also liked reading, but since the baby had come along she had not so much as picked up a book, with the exception of baby books. Bella’s books had no words in them, just stark black-and-white patterns.
At some point during her mother’s illness, her father’s friend—whose name Ailsa could barely recall now, whose name she had no desire to bring to mind—came to live with them for a while. When he sat with the family in their living room, Ailsa made sure always to have a book in front of her, one that was many hundreds of pages thick, the thickness of a door, or a thousand pages thick, the thickness of a wall. She learnt how to be in his company for hours at a time, day after day, and hardly see him. But at the same time, he had learnt how to get around her, for example by challenging her to a game—he would go to the games cupboard and make a show of choosing something, and her father would insist that their guest be indulged. When Ailsa went up to bed and closed her door, she wedged a chair under the handle before turning out the light. One morning, she threw out his shoes. Now she saw that this had been topsy-turvy thinking, as if throwing out his shoes could make him leave. Anyway, by the end of the day, the shoes were back in their place on the shoe rack and nothing was said, and she began to wonder if she had really done it at all or only thought about it.